Friday, June 27, 2025
Lance Bush on justification, truth, and intuitions
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
The Absurdity of Life Without God (June 2025)
*1 - See Reasonable Faith, Third Edition, pg. 74: "So it's not just immortality man needs if life is to be ultimately significant; he needs God and immortality. And if God does not exist, then he has neither."
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Knowledge is justified true belief – blameless beliefs vs justified beliefs
Dad puts on the coffee. Mom puts laundry in the dryer. By coincidence, the timing is such that the dryer beeps to let us know it's done at the same time the coffee machine would normally beep to let us know that the coffee is done. But this time, the coffee machine fails to make a sound to signify that coffee is ready – the machine has worn down. By coincidence again, the laundry machine beep and the coffee machine beep sound very similar. So dad, sitting in his living room chair, hearing the laundry machine go off, understandably concludes that the coffee is done. And he's right – it is done. But if you were to ask dad, "Why do you think the coffee is done?", he would say "Because I heard the deal go off." But that's not true. What he heard was the laundry machine. So he gives a false reason for his belief. False reasons (answers to why questions) can never be good reasons to believe. Sure, it's understandable that dad would conclude what he did. But it's not, as it turns out, reasonable. Understandable belief and justified belief are not the same.
In the classic example of the broken clock, when you ask the person, "Why did you believe the time is 1 p.m.?", their answer is "Because the clock said 1 p.m." But that's not true. The clock doesn't say that the time today is 1 p.m. It says that the time yesterday was 1 p.m. at the moment the clock stopped working. Typically, clocks tell you the time of the day, which is why it's understandable to conclude that the clock is speaking of today. But when clocks stop working, they tell you the time of whatever day they stopped working. (See Bogardus & Perrin, "Knowledge is Believing Something Because It’s True". The clock reads 1 p.m. because the time was 1 p.m., not because it is 1 p.m.)
There are false understandable beliefs, which we can call false blameless beliefs, or understandably false beliefs or blamelessly false beliefs or innocently false beliefs, something to that effect. But being blameless in your believing doesn't make you justified in your believing. Humans may have been, at one point or another, blameless in their beliefs in gods, aether, miasma, phlogiston, geocentrism, or what have you, but these beliefs were never justified. Having an understandable or blameless belief is to have a justified belief in the internalist sense, which is why you can have internally "justified" false beliefs. But internalism is false when it comes to the kind of justification needed for knowledge.
We can think of the two kinds of justification (internalism vs externalism) as answers to different questions: is this person's reason for believing a good (i.e. true) reason? If yes, then their belief is justified (external). Is this person's believing an indication that there is something wrong with them, such as being intellectually vicious or stupid? If not, then their belief is justified (internal). So the two senses of justification are compatible.
Luck dissolves knowledge because luck dissolves justification. Justification cannot be arbitrary, and lucky beliefs are only true arbitrarily. What we want is to have the least arbitrary possible beliefs.
To illustrate this you can think of Christian denominations. Why be Episcopalian when you could be Methodist? Why be Roman Catholic when you could be Anglican? From the outside looking in, it can seem painfully arbitrary as to which denomination you should join. We know intuitively that arbitrariness destroys justification, which destroys any chance of you having arrived at the truth in any secured way. There is no reason to think that one denomination is true above the others. What you're saying, essentially, is either that you 1) Have yet to see any arguments for any denomination, in which case it would be arbitrary for you to pick one over the others; or 2) You have seen arguments on behalf of various denominations but you don't think any of them are any good. Good arguments supply good reasons, and good reasons form the exact chain or link you are looking for to remove arbitrariness. This is a link between truth and your belief. This is exactly what justification is meant to be: the link between what's true and what you believe, the link that explains how you came to believe in the truth rather than a falsehood. (And this is why psychoanalysis is essential to explaining opposing beliefs. You can't explain opposing beliefs in terms of their truth, so instead you explain them in terms of their psychological appeal or something like that. Note that explaining opposing beliefs in terms of psychology need not be belittling; wrong beliefs can, again, be blameless and not reflect poorly on the believer in any meaningful way. The point is the simple fact that you cannot explain opposing beliefs in terms of their truth [unless you're prepared to accept a dialetheia in that situation].)
For those folks with strong internalist intuitions, eliminating arbitrariness requires knowing that you know. After all, if you don't know that there is such a link between the truth and your belief, how can you know whether your belief is arbitrary or not, and, therefore, whether your belief is justified or not?
But there are reasons to think that you can eliminate arbitrariness without being aware of the elimination. This is a standard objection to internalism: animal knowledge. The lion knows the outline of his territory. How does the lion know this? Because the truth of the lion's (non-propositional) belief explains the lion's belief. The lion has a properly functioning brain which gives the lion access to highly reliable faculties of perception and memory. The connection between the truth and the lion's belief is non-arbitrary because it is mediated by a properly functioning brain capable of allowing the lion to grasp, understand, and remember its environment.
Laurence BonJour says the following about the objection from animal belief against internalism (Epistemology, Second Edition, pgs. 206–7):
"I once owned a German shepherd dog named Emma. . . . She understood a wide range of commands, seemed to exhibit an excellent memory for people and places . . . and could be amazingly subtle and persistent in communicating her desires . . . Anyone who observed her very closely would, I think, have found it impossible to deny that Emma had conscious beliefs and desires, together with other conscious mental states such as excitement or fear. But did Emma have any reasons or justification for her beliefs? Did she have knowledge? . . . despite her intelligence, it is hard to believe that Emma engaged in very much or indeed any reasoning, and still harder to believe that she was capable of understanding complicated arguments. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Emma could have even understood the basic idea of having a reason for a belief, an understanding that seems to be required for her to have had fully explicit access to any reasons at all. Thus it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Emma had no justified beliefs and hence no knowledge, a result that is alleged . . . to be highly implausible. Surely, it is argued, Emma was justified in believing and . . . even . . . knew such things as that there was a squirrel on the other side of the quad . . . or that the person at the front door was her good friend Marc . . ."
That applies to perceptual, non-propositional beliefs (the kind animals have). What about metaphysical, propositional beliefs? Something similar applies. Knowledge of truths about meaning requires "perceptions" of meaning – faculties for understanding, logic, language, and truth. Just as a properly functioning brain eliminates arbitrariness in perception beliefs, so too does it eliminate arbitrariness in metaphysical beliefs. This is where reasons and arguments come into play. Reasons and arguments are part of that "perceptual" chain, analogous to how light and the function of the eye are part of the perceptual chain that gives rise to our true perception beliefs.
And as Bogardus / Perrin say at the end of the paper cited above, you don't need to know that you have knowledge in order to have knowledge, because, as they say, knowing is believing because it's true; i.e., the truth of your belief plays a central role in explaining why you believe it.
So I see two options here: explanation-first and reason-first.
Explanation-first justification says 1) knowing A is believing A because A is true, and 2) when you believe A because A is true you will have a true (and relevant) answer to the why question ("Why do you believe A?"), and that(those) true answer(s) constitute the good reason(s) for why you believe. Explanation-by-truth entails good reasons (for propositional beliefs).
(This assumes the item of knowledge is propositional; non-propositional beliefs don't have and don't need reasons [non-propositional beliefs do have explanations, which, like reasons, are answers to why questions; reasons are internal, agential / personal explanations])
Reason-first justification says that 1) knowledge is justified true belief, with justification entailing having a true answer to the why question, and 2) for the truth of that answer to play a central role in explaining why you cite it as your answer to the why question. Good reasons entail explanation-by-truth (for propositional beliefs).
(BonJour also notes that internalism and externalism may be compatible, addressing separate issues: pgs. 215–16.)
Questions to ponder:
a) Are there non-propositional beliefs?
b) Do non-propositional beliefs have reasons? Can they?
c) Do animals have reasons for why they believe (if they have beliefs)? Or do animals have non-propositional beliefs, which do not require, and cannot have, reasons?
d) Justification is the link between the truth and your belief such that your belief is non-arbitrary. To truly eliminate arbitrariness, must you be aware of that link? That is, must you know that such a link has been established to eliminate arbitrariness? If yes, then what is this "knowing"? How can you know such a link has been established? And does this apply to all kinds of beliefs, or only propositional beliefs? After all, it doesn't seem like animals are aware of such links, and yet surely animals have knowledge of whether a predator is chasing them, what's good to eat, of which member of their tribe is their mother, etc.
e) Do propositional beliefs require internal justification (i.e., good reasons)? If yes, is it because they are propositional, and propositional beliefs, to be non-arbitrary, require a connection to the truth that only reasons can provide?
f) Or is internal justification purely related to the blameworthiness of someone's beliefs? (i.e. If one of your beliefs is not justified in the internalist sense, then does that mean that that belief says something bad about you as a truthseeker, by, for example, indicating a lack of intellectual virtue on your part?)
g) Does explanation-by-truth entail having good reasons for propositional beliefs? Or does having good reasons for one's propositional beliefs entail explanation-by-truth? (i.e. Are good answers good because they are true and because their truth explains why they are given as answers?) Or is justification just explanation-by-truth all the way down, or just having good reasons all the way down? Or none of the above?
Friday, June 20, 2025
Free Will: Still Not Real (reacting to Emerson Green)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBl0I7kTXo8
"Dennett of course doesn't mean that one can be the author of their thoughts or desires in the maximalist sense, but so what?"
So what is that your actions don't say anything about you in that case, only about what you have. You can describe someone in terms of their non-essential properties, whether they are virtuous or vicious in this or that way. That's obviously important as it lets you know what to expect of their behavior, whether to stay away from them or whether they are safe (or whether they would make for a good interlocutor in a conversation or just resort to name-calling).
But descriptions of non-essential properties are not descriptions of essential properties... obviously. If my essential property is my subjectivity, then everything else about me is non-essential, something I have but not am. (And this is why trying to solve free will without first solving personal identity will never work, I think. How can I make sense of what it means for me to be blamed if I don't know what 'me' is?)
"If I'm not the source of my actions because I didn't self-generate my own nature ex nihilo, then the hose isn't a source of water . . . I think to say that it's false that the hose is a true source of water has some pretty absurd implications if you follow it through . . ."
I'm happy to say that the hose is a source of water, because it's not a source in any sense that gives me reason to be dissuaded from my free will skepticism.
In tort & criminal law you have the "but-for" test to determine factual causation. Ex. But for the fact that I acted (or failed to act) as I did, the injury would not have happened. So my action (or failure to act) is the factual cause of injury. (That's not enough to determine legal responsibility, as my conduct has to be a proximate cause, or I have to have a duty to act, etc. But I digress.)
So the hose is a source of water in the sense that it "passes" the but-for test; but for the hose, I would not have access to water (or, I would have one fewer access points to water).
Likewise, our conduct can pass the but-for test. But that doesn't mean we're free; it doesn't mean that my actions say anything about me even if my actions say something about what I have. And what I have is perfectly morally relevant when it comes to blame, praise, responsibility, punishment, and so on. Like Robert Sapolsky says, if a car has no brakes, you don't let it out onto the roads and risk hurting someone. Likewise, it makes perfect sense to lock up people for the safety of others (and, hopefully, for improving the quality of the incarcerated person so that they can re-integrate into society. But we know that the US prison system couldn't care less about that part). We "praise" (recognize the quality of) cars that function well and "blame" (recognize the poor quality of) them when they don't. We can explain our recourse to praise and blame this way, as a recognition of quality rather than as an accusation of ultimate sourcehood. Indeed, it is by someone's proximate sourcehood that we come to recognize the quality of their kindness, moral reasoning, emotional stability, etc.—qualities they inherited from circumstances.
I'm convinced (any reason why I shouldn't be?) that free will skepticism can make perfect sense of common sense notions of responsibility, blame, praise, punishment, everything, whether in law or moral dilemmas. (Obviously, with the exception of retributive punishment specifically. That doesn't make any sense.)
What explains these dispositions? Where do they come from? Do we choose our dispositions, or are they products of factors beyond our control? It seems to me that compatibilism always kicks the can down the road. Whichever criterion of freedom they cite as the Real Freedom, whether that be acting on desire, or acting on your second-order desires, or acting on self-endorsed values, or acting according to your own sensitivity to reasons, or acting on your own dispositions—for any freedom criterion N, the further question can be asked of what caused N, and we can imagine Pereboom-style scenarios where someone has N and yet intuitively does not have free will, because N was caused by circumstances beyond their control, and the most core intuition we have (certainly, that I have) when it comes to free will is that it's not fair to blame someone for something beyond their control. Put another way, it's not fair to attribute non-essential properties to someone as if they are essential properties.
"We've got the free will we think we have . . ."
I don't think I have any free will. I hear this kind of talk – "We all act as if we're free..." Speak for yourself, I don't! "Given the illusion of free will, we have no choice but to act as if we are free." What illusion? I have no such illusion. My intuitions point me completely and totally toward free will skepticism. I'm happy to admit that I have freedom, which is probably what folks are referring to. Freedom in this sense refers to having options to choose from and the sense of choice that accompanies selecting one option over others. Sure, absolutely, I have that. But while freedom concerns the choices you have available to you, free will concerns the nature of the choice made—does your choice reveal something about you per se or merely about what you have, about your circumstances?
Thursday, June 19, 2025
Quotes on pain – John Green and Jordan Peterson
John Green: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTEhBL7CetU
Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4DgBQ9N5qk
"When people hear that their pain isn't real, they immediately disbelieve you because they know that their pain is real; it's the realist thing in the world." –John Green
YouTube: Mythical Kitchen, "John Green Eats His Last Meal", 10 June 2025, timestamp 29:27.
". . . actually, things do have meaning. The proof of that, the most direct proof, is pain. No one disbelieves in their pain. Descartes said "I think, therefore I am", but it's more of a religious statement, and you can derive this from many religions, that the fundamental truth is "I suffer, therefore I am." And I think the reason for that is because, I don't care what you don't have faith in. The one thing you believe in is your own pain. And pain is a form of meaning, and what alleviates pain therefore, and suffering, is also a form of meaning. And I would say that the primary religious injunction, along with telling the truth, is to do what you can to alleviate suffering. And I think the truth is actually a corollary of that, because untruth produces more suffering than truth." –Jordan Peterson
Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast, February 2017, reposted on YouTube by hihosilver, 06 Jul 2022, timestamp 1:22:28.
"That's why so many religions, like the Buddhist religion, insists that existence is suffering. The reason for that, it's a claim about what's irreducibly real. Everyone acts as if their pain is real. It doesn't matter what they say, it doesn't matter what kind of materialist they are or what they think about the human soul, or anything like that. When it comes right down to it, there's nothing more real than pain." –Jordan Peterson (Emphasis in bold is mine.)
Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast, February 2017, reposted on YouTube by hihosilver, 06 Jul 2022, timestamp 1:45:50.
Bonus:
"One thing I've learned as a clinical psychologist is that you do not hit a target you don't aim for." –Jordan Peterson
Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast, February 2017, reposted on YouTube by hihosilver, 06 Jul 2022, timestamp 1:34:15.
Monday, June 16, 2025
Bishop Robert Barron is wrong about some things
William Lane Craig on why there aren't miracles today
Monday, June 9, 2025
09 June 2025 - Thoughts
- Today I'm working on post #2 in my series on intellectual virtue. This will examine the words of Michael Huemer.
- Yesterday I posted quotes and some responses to Joe Schmid's words on intellectual virtue. I'm basically in total agreement, especially with the idea that virtue is the foundation of critical thinking. Where does philosophy begin? It begins with psychology, with the kind of person you are. If you are the kind of person who wants answers to philosophical questions, then you are the right kind of person for doing philosophy. If you are the kind of person who wants truth, then there are certain practices and attitudes you will take on to maximize your chances of finding the truth and ensuring that you are not stuck in falsehoods.
- Disagreements: I will probably take a different approach to defining virtue, and I also clashed somewhat with the idea that there is always room for rational disagreement (even on complex topics). Depending on how we define rationality, rational disagreement is not possible; at least one person believes on the basis of false reasons. But you cannot blame someone for believing on the basis of false reasons, especially when the person is not believing on the basis of intellectual vices like wishful thinking or social pressure.
- There are two senses of blame here. On the first sense, you cannot blame anyone at all ever for any of their beliefs, because you cannot blame someone for their intelligence, knowledge, and so on. We do not choose our beliefs and we do not choose what makes sense to us. On the second sense, you can "blame" someone in the sense of acknowledging that there is something this person lacks. Some kinds of believing will reveal more of a lack than others. There is rational disagreement in the sense that people can disagree without lacking anything other than knowledge, which doesn't speak badly about the person qua truthseeker. Other kinds of disagreement involve a lack of intellectual virtue, which does speak badly about the person qua truthseeker.
- I had written some on tribalism in general and tribalism within Christianity, inspired by Joe's remarks on tribalism, but those writings have been lost. I think the gist of what I had to say was that 1) Tribalism involves us-versus-them thinking, echo chambers, socially reinforced beliefs (believing not because something makes sense, but because you will be socially punished otherwise), sophistry (saying words for the effect the words have on others, not for the truth of the words), heuristics, group psychology, ego, defensiveness, identity, group identity, doing things not because they are good or true but because they help the tribe and help your standing within the tribe, and a number of other pernicious things that I don't currently remember. 2) Tribalism thus causes intellectual vice and thus impedes truthseeking. 3) Tribalism is a problem that cannot be solved because humans depend on tribes for their survival. Even being a truthseeker runs the risk of falling into tribalist traps with "us truthseekers vs those irrational non-truthseekers" way of thinking. 4) The closest to a solution is to be radically socially independent. But this is impossible in most cases. Either you depend on family for survival, or you depend on a job. Both cases involve social structures and social structures are tribes. Survival and (philosophical) truthseeking sadly come apart in many ways, which is why humans are so overwhelmingly bad at philosophy. 5) You can try to select or procure a tribe that is the least tribalistic, but it's hard to see how tribalism can be fully eliminated. Being aware of tribalism and selecting or procuring a tribe in a strategic way can mitigate or even eliminate some of tribalism's worst effects. But how far can that go? It seems to me that tribalism is a fundamental feature of human nature. You could say that ego death is necessary to defeat tribalism. But how can someone undergo an ego death and continue living in this world as if you are concerned about your own survival? To live just is to live as a surviving thing, a thing concerned about its survival. How can you both undergo an ego death and be a thing concerned about its survival?
- I will discuss virtue more broadly when I get to Aristotle.
- After this series I would like to do a brief series on Plato and Aristotle. That will be quick to put together as I've already done most of the work.
- I have Huemer's new book on knowledge, so that's on the to-read list. I will probably go into knowledge after mistakes and autonomous facts. Some things to discuss there: a priori vs a posteriori knowledge; analyticity vs tautology; laws of logic; justification.
- I gave a definition of justification that said a belief is justified when there are good reasons to believe it. Reasons are answers to why questions. I also said explanations are answers to why questions too, and so reasons and explanations are connected. (On one reading of 'reason', reasons are more internal, something the self is aware of. On a reading of 'explanation', explanations are external, existing independently of someone's awareness. There's an explanation for why fire is hot even if no one knows it. But there is an externalist reading of reasons too.)
- This means there's probably some way to reconcile explanationism—the view that knowledge is when you believe something because it's true—with the view that justification is based on reasons.
- Both explanationism and justification-by-reasons can probably be reconciled with some kind of foundationalism, and indeed might depend on some kind of foundationalism. I'm aware that Huemer is a foundationalist. I find the view attractive, as alternatives like skepticism and coherentism seem mistaken.